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Thanks to all for your support for this year’s PMC! Looking like $48 million will be donated to Dana Farber for cancer research this year! Not too late if you haven’t contributed… ;) http://www2.pmc.org/profile/WM0015 I make my personal donation as a sponsor to insure every $ you donate goes to cancer research and not to expenses: ‘Mosler Economics/MMT’ was featured on the back pocket of the jersey. Hard to see in this picture so I circled it in red: The start in Wellesley:...

from Lars Syll If bonus or “incentive pay” schemes work so well for senior executives and bankers, why does everyone not get them? The conventional answer is that a bonus scheme or incentive plan will indeed encourage the recipients to make more money for the shareholders or clients on whose behalf they act … A classic paper on the “principal-agent problem” … by Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom pointed out that the conventional answer makes the mistake of assuming that jobs are simple and...

This is reflected in the deceleration of commercial real estate lending: From Dodge Data Analytics: Dodge Momentum Index Stumbles in July The Dodge Momentum Index fell in July, dropping 3.3% to 135.0 (2000=100) from its revised June reading of 139.6. The Momentum Index is a monthly measure of the first (or initial) report for nonresidential building projects in planning, which have been shown to lead construction spending for nonresidential buildings by a full year. The move...

Dan here…I have been notified that there are some problems with comments, such as updating the number of comments, automatic fill in of data for regular users, and comments can ‘disappear’ before completion (which btw just happened to my first try at this note), I have notified MEV tech of the problems. I will disappear this note when the problems are fixed.

from David Ruccio   At one time, from the late-1970s until the last couple of years, Britain—or at least the British ruling class—was in love with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was the common sense of both major political parties—the Tories and Labor (plus, the Conservative coalition partner Liberal Democrats)—as well as most large corporations and wealthy individuals. As Andy Beckett explains,   In the early years of the 21st century, the inevitability of an ever more competitive,...

I haven’t been following the Google Memo saga all that closely, but I do have some random thoughts about the whole brouhaha: 1. If the distribution of skillsets, interests and temperament is the same between men and women, why do the latest figures (June 24, 2017) from the Bureau of Prisons indicate that 93.3% of federal prisoners are men? 2. Would a rational person, upon learning that 93.3% of federal prisoners are men, jump to the conclusion that our...

from Paul Davidson An international financial architecture system to deal with persistent trade imbalances and any international financial crisis can be developed to operate under the same economic principles laid down by Keynes at Bretton Woods. But this system does not require the establishment of a supranational central bank of the world as Keynes suggested in his “Keynes Plan” at Bretton Woods. Instead, this new international payment system is aimed at obtaining a more acceptable...

No sign of Trumped up expectations fading here: Hires fell, which most are saying indicates a lack of supply of workers. But the low wage growth and low participation rates tell me it’s more likely about low aggregate demand: Highlights Job openings rose sharply in June, to 6.163 million from 5.702 million in May. Hires, however, fell sharply, to 5.356 million from 5.459 million. This data set can be volatile but the underlying theme is a separation between openings and...

Less than expected as the deceleration continues. I read this as reflecting a drop in consumer spending. The savings rate has been down, and the personal income curve has been bent lower as well, and retail sales have also slowed. So it can all be read this way:The consumer has less real disposable income, has cut back on spending, and has been ‘forced’ to put some of that reduced spending on his credit card, though less than the prior month, which doesn’t bode well for...